By Henk Kombrink, Aberdeen Director & Chair of DEVEX 2019

The Devex conference is an annual two-day conference held in Aberdeen focused on the UKCS upstream oil and gas sector. It is run by three societies – the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), the Aberdeen Formation Evaluation Society (AFES) and the PESGB. The talks at the conference cover a wide range of topics from exploration via new logging tools to reservoir management. For this reason, the conference is an ideal platform to learn about aspects of the North Sea oil industry outside your daily routine, which is augmented by the fact that Devex also offers a suite of longer presentations that aim to give more of a background to various technical aspects of the upstream sector. In addition, a range of companies also showcase their products through a stand in the big coffee hall, and some of those were also able to pitch at one of the popular Techbyte sessions.

This year’s Devex conference was a great success again. We had over 300 delegates on both days and a packed technical program with two parallel sessions. I want to thank Brenda Wyllie (SPE) and Richard Arnold (AFES) for the pleasant collaboration over the past year in the run-up to the conference. Brenda’s vision to revive the conference a few years ago by offering free places has resulted in continuation of high delegate numbers in times of significant pressure on corporate spending.

The PESGB Young Professionals have also been very active as they put together a very good and well-attended YP session on the first day of the conference. This year’s theme was Big data in the Oil and Gas sector, and various speakers shed their own intriguing light on this. Thanks to Max Sheridan and Lynne Warren for making this happen.

A new aspect of this year’s conference was the speaker gifts. During one of the Technical Committee sessions – which took place at Fairfield’s office in Westhill – it was mentioned that the company was looking to rehome a selection of cores from the Dunlin field. This field is currently being decommissioned by Fairfield and as such the core is being considered redundant. The PESGB felt that that this is a perfect opportunity for converting some of these cores to speaker gifts. ConocoPhillips also donated core and therefore we were able to hand out pieces of Rotliegend and Brent core to all speakers at the conference. An ideal way to distribute our North Sea geological legacy.

The PESGB will chair the Devex 2019 conference and we are determined to put together another successful conference through continuing our valuable partnership with SPE and AFES.